Inmate 1577

6

Karen Vail arrived at San Francisco International Airport at 11pm. Her connecting flight in Atlanta was delayed due to weather somewhere over the country, so she’d picked up a copy of Nelson DeMille’s latest novel at an airport bookstore and devoured half of it by the time she touched down at SFO.

Robby had turned her on to DeMille. He’d said DeMille’s main character, John Corey, was a lot like her-a sarcastic, wise-cracking former detective. She told Robby he had his head up his ass. But now that she’d read DeMille’s novels, she realized that maybe she did share a few similar characteristics with John Corey-but she wouldn’t give Robby the satisfaction.

“First of all, I’m not a wiseass,” she started. He merely squinted at her. Fine, that wasn’t too convincing an argument. I wouldn’t believe that one, either. “Second, I’m a lot better cop than Corey.”

That was when Robby tilted his head and said, “You’re comparing your skill set to a fictional character?” And then he delivered his zinger, designed to put her in her place: “Besides. Come to think of it, I think maybe Corey’s a little smarter than you are.”

At that point, Vail fell back on the only card she had left to play. “Who would you rather sleep with. Fictitious John Corey, or me?”

Robby didn’t have a comeback for that-or he chose to keep it to himself. Wise choice.

Vail took a cab to the Hyatt Regency in the city, left a message for Inspector Lance Burden that she had arrived later than she had anticipated, and told him she would meet him at 8 AM at the Hall of Justice’s Homicide Detail on Bryant Street. Then she sent an email to her friend, Roxxann Dixon, an investigator with the Napa County District Attorney’s office, who served with her on the Crush Killer task force a few months back. Vail didn’t know if they would be able to coordinate a dinner together, but she wanted her to know that she was working a serial killer case in the city in case they had a chance to see one another.

The wind coming off the Bay struck her as she got out of the cab on California Street. Vail walked past the cable car, loading passengers in front of the Hyatt, and strode up to the hotel’s entrance, where the escalators carried her up to the third floor. As the moving stairs lifted her toward the lobby, the grandness of the central atrium left her jaw slack. Ahead, a massive sculpture-it looked like a swirling copper sphere-sat atop a black marble base with water cascading down its sides. To her left, thousands of tiny lights, suspended from above, stretched what must’ve been a hundred feet in length by a hundred feet in width.

“Wow,” she said under her breath.

After so many sleepless nights on this coast, Vail was relieved to enjoy a restful evening, in a comfortable bed and no middle-of-the-night pages, texts, or calls. She dreamt of Robby and was disappointed when she awoke early to find that he wasn’t beside her. Despite the momentary letdown, she felt refreshed and ready to go to work.

After showering, while still wrapped in a bath sheet, she pulled open the curtains and peered out the window for the first time. Her view was the finest she had ever seen: the room was on the fourteenth floor and overlooked the Embarcadero and Port of San Francisco. Maybe this trip won’t be so bad after all.

To her right stood the steel blue Bay Bridge, stretching from an island on the left all the way to the furthest reaches of her window’s field of vision on the right. A cargo ship marked Hanjin in enormous white letters set against a dark body ferried blue and red containers on its back. An escort tug tailed it a safe distance astern as both vessels passed beneath the farthest span of the bridge.

The sky was a thick gray, remnants of fog hanging low in the distance. While pondering the weather and what to wear, her wakeup call came, the automated voice welcoming her and informing her that the high temperature was expected to be a nippy 52 degrees. Actually, the recording omitted the adjective.

In her haste to pack-Gifford hadn’t left her much time-she’d neglected to check the weather. She pulled out the pair of form-fitting jeans that she had worn on the plane and snuggled into a tight-knit black sweater. She stepped into the cylindrical, windowed elevator and again marveled at the curtain of hanging lights as the car descended to the lobby. Curbside, she was about to hail a taxi when a text message from Inspector Burden hit her BlackBerry. He wanted to meet instead at the crime scene, in an area he called the Marina District.

Vail gave the cab driver the address and asked how long till they arrived. It was only a few miles-a ten-minute ride, traffic permitting.

She arrived as promised, in front of a well-appointed line of charming row houses, decked out in muted colors of butterscotch and sapphire, each sporting their own variation of wrought iron-wrapped balconies.

Standing out front of a creamy avocado building marked with a brass “114” was a tall, thin man chomping on a slice of gum. Vail paid the taxi driver, then walked up to the house. “Karen Vail. Are you Burden?”

The inspector extended a hand. “With a lot of things, yeah.”

Vail took it. His grip was soft and quick. “A sense of humor. A bad one, but a sense of humor. That’s good.”

“My kids give me shit too.”

“About the weak handshake or your bad jokes?”

Burden drew back. “Man, you’re a fiery one. Give me a few minutes to adjust to that, okay?”

“Only a few minutes? You’re in danger of impressing me, Inspector.”

He eyed her cautiously. “Maybe a few days.”

Vail broke a smile. “That’s more like it. But if it helps, I’m told I grow on you once you get to know me.”

“I wanted Mark Safarik.”

Vail nodded. Hey, if it was me, I’d want Safarik, too. But she kept that to herself. “He’s not available. You get me.”

Burden pulled his leather jacket tighter as the wind whipping off the Bay blew through his thin shirt.

Vail shivered. “What’s up with your weather? It’s July. If I’d known it was gonna be this goddamn cold, I’d have packed a jacket and gloves.”

Burden pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the door to the house. “Don’t you know the famous quote?”

Vail frowned. “I know a lot of famous quotes, Inspector. You have a particular one in mind?”

“‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.’ Mark Twain. Well, some think Twain said it.”

“Never heard it.”

Burden moved inside the house. “The city’s weather is kind of like Australia, all messed up calendar-wise.”

Vail eyed him. “Okay. Right. San Francisco is Australia. Got it.” She followed him in through the door and up the stairs.

“Any security other than locks on the doors?”

“Nope.” Burden led her inside, to the mouth of the living room. “That bedroom there,” he said, gesturing down the hall with a nod of his chin. “That’s where the body was found.”

“Got another piece of gum?” Vail asked.

“It’s Nicorette.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “In that case, I’ll pass.”

“By the way. You can drop the Inspector crap. Guys in the unit call me Birdie.”

Vail eyed him. “Birdie.”

Burden shrugged a shoulder. “Yeah, I didn’t like it either at first. But after twenty years, I’ve kind of embraced it. Burden works, too. Don’t really care for Lance. No one calls me by my first name. Except my mother.”

“What about your wife?”

“She calls me jackass.” He apparently noted Vail’s confusion. “We’re divorced.”

Burden led the way to the bedroom. “What do people call you?”

“Depends who you ask. Asshole. Bitch. But those are just my friends.” Vail grinned. “Karen’s fine.”

Burden nodded. “Why don’t we start with Karen, and as I get to know you we can graduate to Bitch?”

“I think I’m going to enjoy working with you, Burden.”

“Hey, I was born in New York. I understand sarcasm.”

“Good. You’re likely to get a good dose of it.” Vail indicated the bedroom. “Shall we?”

“I was trying to avoid it.”

“I can tell.” She pushed open the solid-core wood door and stepped in. A queen bed sat in the middle of the room. Unremarkable furniture lined the wall to her right, below a large bay window that gave her a third-floor view of the top portion of a fog-obscured Golden Gate Bridge tower peeking out between the crests of nearby low-cut trees.

Dried bloodstains soiled the left side of the mattress.

“Vic was eighty-two. Maureen Anderson. Married, haven’t been able to reach the husband. William. Last seen yesterday morning.”

“Who called it in?”

“Neighbor came by for dessert and coffee. She didn’t answer the door. Maureen was apparently very reliable, so an hour later, when she still wasn’t answering, the woman got concerned and dispatch sent out a well-check.”

“Any evidence her husband left on a trip?”

“Nothing we’ve been able to determine. Still following up with airlines, family, credit card records. The usual. Put out an APB as soon as we found the body. He’s the obvious prime suspect.”

Vail winced. “Not so fast. And not so obvious. What do we know about him? About their relationship?”

“Good, according to the neighbors. The usual bickering, but from what we’ve been told, looks like they genuinely loved each other.”

“What was his occupation?” Vail asked. “What level of education?”

“He retired about five years ago. He was a lawyer with a firm here in the city. Last five or so years, he was ‘of counsel,’ picking the cases he wanted to work on.”

“What kind of cases?”

Burden scratched at his forehead. “White-collar defense.”

“What about the place. Ransacked? Anything missing?”

“Nothing, far as we can tell. Money, jewelry, valuables. All here.”

Vail glanced around. “It’s harder to notice something missing than something added. But there’s a fair amount of dust. Did you-”

“Check all the flat surfaces where the dust is missing, like if an object’s been removed? Yeah, we know what we’re doing, Karen. We thought of that. Like I said, nothing appears to be missing.”

“Forensics? I see some blood spatter on the wall-”

“Castoff, from a shoe, most likely. He kicked her. Looked to me like he kicked her while she was on the floor, then got her up on the bed for the second act of his horror show.” Burden shook his head in disbelief, then continued. “Forensics are still being processed. But from what I’m told, he didn’t leave a whole lot. We came up with fibers, hair, that kind of stuff, but whether any of that belongs to the offender remains to be seen.”

“And this blood. Here,” she said, pointing at the pooled stain on the bed. “If she was lying with her head in the usual spot, this bloodstain would be about where her vagina would be. I know she was raped, but-”

“The scumbag sodomized her, too. With an umbrella. It was brutal. That’s what got me thinking that we were looking at something far more complex than what we’re used to dealing with. That’s why I asked for Safarik.”

“Understood. Not likely a white-collar criminal would be good for this. Unless there was a really bad thing done to him and he snapped and crossed the line. Even then, the anger and ability to become violent would be in his repertoire of behaviors. It’d be there, even if it hadn’t yet manifested in a way we’d have seen publicly.”

“So not our first choice for a theory.”

“Definitely not,” Vail said. She knelt down and examined the area underneath the bed. “Any semen?

“Looks like he used a condom. ME found spermicide.”

“Tell me more. Cause of death? She didn’t die of rape.”

Burden bit his lower lip. “ME thinks she was tortured before she was killed.”

“Tortured how?”

Burden turned away. “Electric shocks.”

“Like a stun gun or a Taser-type device?”

“ME said no. More irregular, like nothing she’d ever seen before. She said she’d read about a case in a rural town in the Midwest where some guy had taken an electrical cord and snipped off the end, then splayed apart the exposed wires. He shoved the plug into a wall outlet and then shocked the vic. And those burn patterns matched the burn marks on Mrs. Anderson’s body. Electrical burn marks.”

“I’ll want to see the body.”

“Figured you might. But I thought you should see the crime scene first, so I told the ME we’d be by around eleven.”

Vail pointed at the bed. “This is where you found her? Facing the doorway?”

“Yeah. Like she was peacefully at rest. Even though, well, she wasn’t.” He shook his head. “Legs were spread. Like I said, he used an umbrella. Lots of vaginal and anal tearing, all the way up into the abdominal cavity.”

“Bodily fluids? DNA?”

“Working it up.” He nodded at a spot on the carpet. “There were four deep impressions at the far side of the bed, near the window. And drag marks leading away.”

“A chair? Someone was watching?”

“My partner’s guess? Forced to watch.”

“The husband.”

“Possibly,” Burden said. “Assuming he’s not the killer.”

Vail nodded thoughtfully. After a long moment, she said, “Okay.”

“So COD, to answer your question. Multiple. Heart attack, probably from the shocks she sustained. But there was also substantial head trauma. Like I said, she was kicked. Repeatedly. Hard. And there was some cutting on the body, but not deep.”

“I’ll want to see your photos.”

“Being printed this morning. My partner’s putting together a packet for you full of what we’ve got so far.”

Vail stepped over to the window and peered out, taking in not the scenery but whatever was there to see. Routes of escape, views that passersby might have had. What the neighborhood looked like from this vantage point.

“How long have they lived here?”

Burden pulled a notepad from his interior sport coat pocket. Flipped a couple pages. “In the neighborhood, twenty-two years. In this place, nineteen.”

“We’ll need a list of all residents in a six-block radius, with ages and occupations of the males. Contact info, too. Flag any with prior violent acts or arrests of any kind.”

“In this neighborhood?”

“Is that a problem?”

“Nope.” Burden pulled out an older model BlackBerry and began typing. “I’ll have my partner start on it. It’ll take a while to get that together.”

Vail turned away from the window. “What can you tell me about Mrs. Anderson?”

Burden shrugged. “People liked her. She had her circle of friends, many for a couple decades or so. But she wasn’t overly social.”

“Let’s check into the Andersons’ finances…were they involved in any shady deals? Were they the subject of a scam? Were they involved in any failed business or real estate partnerships that might’ve gone south?”

Burden began typing again. “Don’t know. Nothing that came up.”

“Ask the neighbors, family members. Let’s be thorough.” Vail crouched down to peer under the bed. “I take it you haven’t had any other elderly female sexual homicides in the region the past few years.”

He pocketed his BlackBerry. “Correct. I checked before calling. I knew we hadn’t had any up till ’06, when Safarik was here for that Violent Crimes conference the BAU put on for us. That’s why I was concerned. Somebody like this, I think he’s gonna hit again. We need to grab him up quickly.”

Vail thought a moment before responding, because she knew her answer was not going to be one that Burden wanted to hear. She decided to withhold her opinion until she had gathered more information and examined the body. “Are any of the lamp cords missing or cut?” Vail asked.

“What?”

“You said it looks like he used an electrical cord to torture Mrs. Anderson. Did anyone check the appliances, lamps, anything with a power cord?”

“I don’t see-”

“Did he bring it with him, or did he use what was here? If he brought it with him, that indicates premeditation. He planned this out. And that typically points to-”

“An organized offender.”

Vail tilted her head back. “Very good. There’s a very recent shift away from using that term and classification system, but I’m impressed.”

“I remember that from Safarik’s session at the conference. But don’t get all excited. A lot of it went in one ear and out the other. Wish we’d recorded it.”

“What, and put me out of a job?”

Burden looked at the night table. “We didn’t check the appliances. Guess we should do that.”

“Guess we should.” Vail and Burden began inspecting every outlet and powered device in the townhouse.

Vail pulled back the nightstand closest to her and peered over its back for an outlet. “Was she naked when you found her?”

Burden yanked the mattress aside to check behind the bed. “Nightgown was pulled up.”

“Over the head?”

Burden thought a second. “No, why?”

“Offenders sometimes cover their victims’ faces with an article of clothing or a pillow. A lot of times they pull up the dress and drape it across the eyes. Think of it like an apology, embarrassment at what they’re doing to an elderly woman. Maybe they don’t want to look at the face they’ve just beaten the hell out of. But if we’re dealing with a psychopath, they don’t feel anything. No remorse, embarrassment, guilt. Nothing.”

“It’s hard to think of these monsters being embarrassed about what they’re doing.”

Vail moved over to the dresser in front of the wall opposite the bed. “Like a lot of the behaviors we see, it’s symbolic. Psychologically, they’re not aware of why they’re doing what they’re doing. It just feels right to them. It gives them a sense of power; it’s sexually gratifying, exciting.”

“Exciting, huh? Man, I just don’t get that.”

“Then congratulations, Burden. You can tell your ex you’re not just a jackass, you’re a normal jackass.”

“Thanks.” He glanced sideways at her. “I think.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Vail was back on task-and headed into the living room to look at the lamps’ electrical cords. “Based on your knowledge of the neighborhood and your discussions with the neighbors, do you think the UNSUB made conscious efforts to avoid detection? That’s Unknown Subject-”

“No shit. I know what an UNSUB is.” Burden grabbed hold of the paisley patterned velour couch and pulled it away from the long living room wall. “To answer your question, I’d say absolutely he did. No one heard anything. No signs of a struggle, no evidence of a forceful break-in.”

“So whatever method he used to gain entry, it was smart-and effective.”

“Judging by the results, it appears so.”

Burden followed an electrical cord along the length of the wall to a clock on the side table. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m trying to build the offender profile.”

“And?”

“And I’ll let you know what I think as soon as I have something intelligent to say.”

“So that could be…never?”

Vail swung to face Burden. “Ooh. Good one. I think I’m gonna like you.” Then she walked into the kitchen where multiple appliances stared back at her. “Any marks on the wrist?”

Burden followed her in and shifted the blender aside. “Restraints were used, if that’s what you’re getting at. Figured it was part of the torture ritual.”

Just torture? More like sexual torture. But Vail absorbed that fact, and assumption, without comment. After a moment’s thought, she said, “First thoughts here…but it looks like we’re looking for a sexual sadist.”

“So,” Burden said, “that would be the first intelligent thing you’ve said?”

Boy, this guy’s good. He’s definitely got game. “Yeah,” Vail said. “That’d be it.”

“And you’re saying he’s a sexual sadist because of the torture?”

“Because of the sexual torture. The scumbag’s inflicting physical or emotional pain-to elicit a response from the victim. It’s a response he finds sexually gratifying. Now you can have torture without sexual gratification, but a sexual sadist, by definition, has to have a living victim. Make sense?”

Burden’s face was contorted. “So he did this to her while she was alive?” He shivered, as if he had bitten into a lemon rind. “Honestly, none of this shit ‘makes sense’ to me.”

I know how you feel. “The husband,” Vail said. “You said he’s an attorney. I assume he’s got no criminal record.”

“I’m sure there’s some crude joke here about lawyers, but no, Mr. Anderson’s got a clean sheet. Like I said, we’ve got an APB out on him.”

“I’m trying to eliminate him as a suspect.”

Burden pushed the toaster back in place, then gave a final look around the townhouse. “Looks like all plugs and appliances are intact. Which means he probably brought the electrical cord with him.”

“So,” Vail said, “he’s either killed before or he intends to kill again. He might also be keeping the tool as a reminder, kind of like a trophy. A way for him to relive the murder.”

“I thought a trophy was something of the victim’s, like a lock of hair or a photo.”

“It can be anything,” Vail said. “Something that has psychological significance to the offender that allows him to relive the kill. I’m not saying this electrical cord is a trophy, but it could function for him like one. Or it could be that it’s a tool in his murder kit.”

Burden sat down heavy in a soft overstuffed living room chair while Vail walked over to the bay windows. The fog was lifting a bit. She could now see more of the Golden Gate’s tower.

“You think this UNSUB will kill again?”

Vail watched the fog roll by. It moved swiftly, tumbling and swirling, like time-lapse photography.

“Unless there’s something else you want to see here, we should get over to the morgue.”

She pulled herself away from the window. “Drive me around the neighborhood a bit so I can get a feel for the area.”

“One thing’ll be obvious,” Burden said as he pushed out of the deep chair. “This isn’t the kind of place you’d expect something like this to happen.”

Vail chuckled. “Thing is, Burden, this shit can happen anywhere. Anytime. To anyone.” Vail glanced back at the bedroom. “Even, unfortunately, to old ladies.”